@darrenshawseo

Acquiring a new business is pretty exciting until you realize that one wrong move on your Google Business Profile can tank your local SEO rankings overnight. Most people are going to follow Google's guidelines which tell you that what you should do is make a brand new profile. But that's a disastrous option because you're going to lose all the ranking benefit and you're going to lose all the reviews from your old profile.

So in this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact process step by step on how to rebrand a Google Business Profile without it getting suspended so that you can maintain your rankings, maintain all your reviews, and most importantly, keep all your customers. Stick around to the end and you'll have a clear proven plan to transition smoothly without starting from scratch. I put all the information from this video in an awesome step by step checklist.

So if you want to copy that, just leave a comment down below.

Let's start with a trap that most people fall into. They create a brand new Google Business Profile, and then they mark the old one as closed. This is literally what Google tells you to do, but it's also the fastest way to lose all of your reviews and all of the local SEO momentum that you've already built up on that profile.

Instead, what you need to do is update the existing profile, but you have to be careful and I'm going to show you how to do it without triggering a re-verification or suspension.

And this is the most important part before you make any changes to your Google Business Profile. You have to update the rest of the web first. What most people do is they just run straight to their Google Business Profile, they change their information, and they hope it works, but this is a huge mistake.

Why?

Because Google does a whole bunch of automated checks whenever you make a change to your Google Business Profile. If they see that your primary info on a profile has suddenly changed, but everything else on the internet says something different, they're going to think that something suspicious is going on and will likely force you to re-verify your profile or worse, suspend it. So first, make sure you update your name, address, and phone number on these key data sources.

The first number one most important source you have to make sure is updated and accurate is your website.

I have a video from ages ago, it might have been the first video I ever made on my YouTube channel where I showed that when you make a change to a Google Business Profile, Google actually immediately crawls the website and tries to verify that information. So whatever page is linked to on the Google Business Profile, make sure that that page is dialed in with the right name, address, and phone number, and a huge tip right here.

A lot of people forget to update the schema code, so you've got to check to make sure that your webpage doesn't have schema on it.

If it has local business schema on the page and you haven't updated that as well, that can be problematic. So make sure you update the schema and any text on the page to match your primary new business information before you update your Google Business Profile. The second most important place is your Facebook business page.

I've seen this time and time again when the information doesn't match on Facebook to what you're entering in your Google Business Profile, Google is like something suspicious and then they force you to re-verify.

Make sure you update your Facebook business page for the brand with the correct name, address, phone number, and other details for whatever you're planning to change it in the rebrand. And then the rest of my list, these are really important sites that Google tends to reference. That would be your Better Business Bureau listing, your Yelp listing, primary data aggregators like Data Axle and Newstar Localese, and also Foursquare.

Okay, so you've updated all of those sources and your next thing to do is wait.

Because it takes some time for Google to index all of those changes. I typically recommend that you wait for two weeks before you go and update your Google Business Profile. Oh, are you still here?

Okay, great.

It's been two weeks now and now that all the dust has settled on those changes I made around the web, I can finally go and update my Google Business Profile. But here's the thing. It's really important that you make these changes under an account that has access to the Google Business Profile as an owner, not a manager.

The reason is that I've seen many cases where when a change is made as a manager, Google doesn't accept it.

But if you make that change as an owner, Google is likely to accept it. So that's an important tip here. Make sure that you make these changes under an owner account, not a manager account.

And here's another area where people get into trouble.

Making too many changes too quickly. If you make a whole scale change, that's also likely to trigger a re-verification or potentially a suspension. Google has a flag and they watch for this because sometimes people will hijack a listing and then they just turn it from a coffee shop listing into a locksmith listing or something like that.

Google watches for that and because that this sort of flag check is in place, my recommendation is to make one change per sensitive field per week.

And so here are the sensitive fields you have to watch out for. Primary category, the business name, the address, the phone number, and the website URL. Those are your key sensitive fields that if you're making any changes to those, you want to put a week in between each change.

And one other thing people often overlook during an acquisition is the photo section.

You don't want to leave a bunch of old logos, old photos of signage, old photos of previous team members on the Google Business Profile. You should go in there and delete the old ones and add a bunch of new ones to represent the new brand. And you can safely update the photo section without any concerns for re-verification or suspension.

No problem.

Alright, so if you follow those steps, you can now go and update the rest of your citations on the internet. And we actually have a service for that at Whitespark. If you're interested, I'll put a link down below in the comments to our Whitespark listing cleanup service.

And that's it.

So if you have any questions, leave them in the comments down below. I'd love to hear your questions and answer them.